What is does the B in B Team represent?

"Branson" would be the obvious answer for many, but how about borrowed?

It was our founder who’d called out Nike CEO Phil Knight on campus at UNC in Chapel Hill around 1998 over the issue of Asian sweatshops. UNC’s legendary status in sport was not to be dismissed lightly.  “I only wrote the invitation” Terry Hallman told me, “but Phil Knight showed up within days, ahead of many other commitments”.

A decade later I'd approached SAB Miller after they set up operations in Ukraine. Andy Wales responded to my suggestion of becoming a service provider:

"Obviously this is very early days for our engagement in Ukraine. I think it will be some months yet before we are ready to engage with potential corporate social investment partners in that market."

I've often wondered to what extent business leaders are influenced by the internet. It was something I first pondered 4 years ago when at the Davos Ukrainian Lunch, Sir Richard Branson  seemed to be paraphrasing one of our published proposals saying:

"Capitalism is the only economic system that really works", he underlined, saying that the downside of the capitalist system is accumulation of great wealth in hands of relatively small number of people. "Not all of these people use their assets to create new jobs and new opportunities." Branson stated.

This is precisely why social role of business, as said by Richard Branson, is so important in modern world. "A modern company should focus not only on making money, but also on solving social problems and investing in protection of environment."

The same argument  will be found online in a 2003 proposal for Ukraine's Tatar community

"Traditional capitalism results in profits for the few people who own an enterprise. Over time, this often results in enormous amounts of money for a few people. This is the appeal of capitalism: the possibility of gaining great personal wealth, becoming rich. The problem is that money is not an unlimited resource. If money piles up in the hands of a few people, this must come at the expense of others who will then have less, or nothing at all. There is no other possibility. This is the basic flaw and weakness of capitalism, and was the central point of the 1996 paper. The end result is uneven distribution of resources."

"There is no requirement in capitalism for the direction in which profits will go. They can accumulate in the hands of a few people, and they can be made available to meet social needs. Using profit to meet social needs does not necessarily remove the profit motive because everyone involved in such an enterprise is likely to want it to be profitable so that they will continue to have a job and income. This has been the case many times in US companies, for example. A company may have an economic downturn and lose money instead of making profit. Employees often accept lower pay to keep their jobs and to keep the company going. Employees know very well that the company must once again make a profit – end up with more money than it requires to operate it each year – if they are to keep their jobs. Otherwise, it will consume more money than is needed to operate and finally cease to exist when all of its money is gone. Employees accepting lower pay is a way to help return the company to profitability. The employees all share the profit motive. The profit motive is not the exclusive domain of the few people who start a company. It is shared by everyone involved because each has his or her own self-interest in keeping the company going."

Similarly Paul Polman  writing of where the moral compass meet the bottom line, seems to be echoing what was in our 2004 UK business plan and subsequent presentationos to the international Economics for Ecology conferences. i.e.

"Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity.”

"The prevailing economics systems in the twentieth century were capitalism and communism. Both systems were hypothetically aimed at creating a means of providing people with comfortable, safe and secure life.

Along the way, in the process of attempting different forms of economics from capitalism to communism, we have managed to pollute and contaminate our own environment to the extent of causing environmental change to the point of quite possible catastrophe for people around the world. Neither the capitalist system nor the communist system – nor the various fascist systems attempted in such as Germany, Spain and Italy – lived up to their promises." 

A few months before the Polman piece , I described it to Mixmarket as the new 'bottom line'

Announcing the launch of the B team, Arianna Huffington says  "As one of 14 inaugural members of the B Team, I've been inspired by the way that over the last few months -- in meetings and on email threads -- the co-founders of the team, Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz, and the other inaugural leaders, have been determined to change the values that drive businesses, to "prioritize people and planet alongside profit" and to move beyond our obsession with quarterly earnings and short-term growth. "

Might the article I published on McKinsey's MIX site on re-imaginging capitalism for people and planet have been another influence? There was also the conversation on Cultivating Empathy sho hosted  on Skolll Social Edge, where I described our activism for abandonded and institutionalised children, quoting our deceased founder:

The term "social enterprise" in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today -- 2008 -- refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don't address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven't enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that "them" might equal "me." Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not.'

 

 

 

As I related recently, writing of the day we become silent about things that matter, our efforts fell on many deaf ears. In 2008, USAID had told us there was no budget for this group of "handicqpped and retarded children", so in March 2009 I approached  Branson's Virgin Unite, saying:

Hello Virgin Team,

I'd submitted several suggestions to your website with no response and this was a follow to explain our work.

At the Ukrainian lunch in Davos, Richard Branson gave a talk suggesting that business should focus more on social problems.

http://pinchukfund.org/en/news/archive/2009/01/29/986.html

This is what we've been doing in Ukraine for 7 years to reach the point that our efforts have persuaded government to adopt changes to childcare policy. We're a small business rendering 100% profit to do something about the plight of orphans and street children in Ukraine.

One of my submitted suggestions was about raising funds to help the founder of a charity Happy Child who support sick and disabled children in Ukraine. She herself is disabled and in need of surgery.

Another suggestion is the proposal to create 10 models of excellence for the rehab centres Ukraine's government agreed to last year. Little has been done since the announcement.

If the Ukraine lunch speech was an indication of intent to apply this in Ukraine, then we're able to show the way.

Regards,

Jeff Mowatt

Answers on a tweet rather than a postcard,  If any other B words come to mind.